What I did on my Summer Vacation

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HAHAHAHAHA. It's funny 'cause it's true! Having somehow acquired the plague on my vacation (which later turned out to be an upper-respiratory infection), there weren't a lot of very physical activities to which I availed myself. I was perfectly content reading in pretty much every location at the resort. And the portability of my book collection is only aided by my recent acquisition of a Kindle. So it was not uncommon to find me nearby to various bodies of water with Kindle in hand and a far-away look in my eye, and a glass of orange juice someplace close.

My best guess is that if you're going to be miserably sick anywhere, it's best to do it someplace tropical where it's not impeding your work or anything. On the other hand, who wants to be sick on vacation?

Just my Luck

Well, not EVERY vacation can be a winner, right? I'm just the kind of person who waits 3 years to take a vacation, only to have it completely buggered by what has turned out to be an upper respiratory infection. What can I say, I'm badass like that.

Keep an eye on this space as my vacation adventures unfold.

They call her ol' one-shoe

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True Story. Just yesterday, I DID, in fact get my shoe wedged in the seam between the door and the step of the work shuttle that brings us back to our cars. I was already 3/4 of the way out of the van and managed to just barely avoid falling flat on my face. That still left me on my knees in the middle of the parking lot with only one shoe, though.

It would have been a lot more embarrassing if I hadn't personally found it so completely hilarious. All that time spent imagining that I could exit the van with the grace and form of an expert gymnast . . . What a waste!

Can you hear me now?!?

You think your roommate is loud? I beg your pardon. Have you ever had a European roommate during soccer season? We have cable tv for the sole purpose of being able to catch the matches between Italy and ... well, whoever is Italy's main rival in soccer. I don't profess to know much of sports, and luckily, I don't have to.

Because for the most part, my roomie keeps to himself, and I stay in my room reading cheesy romance novels. This is for the best.

You've got mailing address!

Ugh. So many comics to catch up on.

I'm touched by the number of you who read the last comic and sent me a message to tell me your own personal stories of apartment-hunting/craigslist horrors. Luckily, my workplace has a nice distribution list for all manner of outside-purposes. So I fired up an email and pretty much spammed my whole company.

And within a matter of minutes, I'd gotten about 6 possible candidates for hassle-free roommates who had already had a background check run on them. Convenient!

Roommate Rumble

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So, a job in Connecticut must beget an apartment in Connecticut, right? 'Cause there's no way in hell I was going to drive to and from Jersey every night. Wasn't going to happen. So where does one who is broke, and relatively friendless find housing on the cheap?

Craigslist, of course! Except that the results of any given search on Craigslist varies greatly. I do not think the majority of people in the world are crazy, but I think it's safe to say that a solid percentage of the folks posting on Craigslist might just be certifiably insane. If they weren't insisting that I could only have a single visitor per month, then they had overzealous dogs, or were smokers, or just wanted too much money. And if none of these things applied, then it was in Bridgeport where there is apparently a magical zone where people will not rent to tiny white girls out of fear of what might happen to them. Curses!

The Interview

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The interview process at this company is hardcore. They’ve been looking for someone to run executive support for MONTHS, but until someone can run the gamut of all 4 interviews successfully, every candidate thus far has been turned away.

But! My interview was so much easier (probably because I’m a consultant). I was in and out in a matter of minutes. And considering I’d driven all the way to Connecticut for it (and in rush-hour traffic no less, right through NYC), it was almost disappointingly simple. Not that I’m complaining. Employment is damn good. It’s just that I’d just spent two and a half hours in a car chanting my new mantra: “Truth! Honesty! Openness! Truth, Honesty, Openness!” which also happens to be the mantra at the company. Have you ever gone to an interview with the sole objective of telling the truth and being completely honest? It’s a hell of a mind game, let me tell you.

It's Quittin' Time!

My, but it's been a while since I posted a comic, hasn't it? Here:

Well, that pretty much wraps up THAT story arc. I'm sure none of you are shocked that it ended this way. Shortly after quitting that deeply demeaning and abusive job at the boutique, I landed myself another position a little higher up the chain but in Connecticut. More details will be coming. It's better, but as you'll all see, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. My GOD, I wish there were unicorns.

Lunch negotiations

There comes a time in a young woman's life when she has to stand up for all that is right and good and delicious. I don't care WHO you think you are. You do not get to make me work during my lunch break. Lunch is only for eating and decompressing.

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I swear if I had to eat in that place, I would keel over from the sheer physical pressure it would require to keep myself sane. And it wouldn't actually be do-able. I would probably throttle her first.

Dis R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There isn't really much that gets my heart pounding more than being called into the boss' office and being told to shut the door. Because once that door is closed, people have not reason NOT to say some really incredibly offensive things.



Maybe I'm just soft from my days working out on the west coast (where they not only probably coined the phrase "passive-agressive", but they also have positive opinions toward taking "mental-health days"), but I was sure that working in some no-name boutique would at least be a little less militaristic than working at a company where I'm nothing but a number. Harsh.

Leading by WHAT Example?

Good Heavens! Where have I been? Oh, that's right, looking for employment. It's certainly been a roller coaster (the least fun kind--the kind they have at the kiddie parks that just goes in a glorified circle and is shaped like a snake or a dragon and you feel mortified by the mere thought that someone might see you on it and recognize you).

Ultimately, my struggle for the acquisition of money meant that I couldn't very well turn down a job offer, even if it was a crap job with no benefits, poor pay, and a mean-spirited boss. A job in the hand and all that.

Meanwhile I keep looking for something significantly better. To give you an idea of the range of pay scales I've been offered, I'll tell you that the hourly salary of the highest-paying job was 10 times greater than the lowest paying job. That is a SIGNIFICANT difference, even when you don't consider statistical significance.

My current job suffers from a great amount of apathy from all who work there, including the owner of the gift shop, where I now wrap gifts [while being heartily lectured on "girl" colors and "boy" colors for gift wrap ('where does green fall on this binary gender range,' I wondered? 'Don't use it,' the managers replied. But come ON! There's a whole stack of green tissue paper and several rolls of green ribbon! If you didn't want me to use it, don't put it out there to tempt me!).

The best option, at this point, is to just find something better. I will feel unreasonably guilty about quitting, but I'll certainly have a much happier outlook once I'm out of there.

True Story

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This really happened yesterday. Sometimes I like New York. Sometimes, I get really skeezed out by it.

The whole state's just one big (punch)line.

True Story:
I went to the DMV yesterday. I guess when people leave New Jersey, they don't usually come back, so there was a lot of confusion over which forms I needed to fill out and which documents I needed. Was I renewing my registration? Or maybe this would be considered a brand new registration? And by their account, I was missing 3 or 4 documents required to get everything done. Since I've just moved back to Jersey, I needed to redo pretty much EVERYTHING: driver's license, car registration and plates, car inspection. At one point, they also told me I'd have to retake the driver's written test. Which is about when I really lost it.

I decided then that the best way to handle the situation was to simply act like I didn't need any of those documents or special procedures. I figured, if they didn't know the appropriate work flow to give me what I needed, then the only thing standing between me and my fully licensed glory was them. Why not simply pretend that I knew what they were supposed to do and guide them accordingly? Surprisingly, that actually worked.

A quick aside about the NJ DMV. It takes roughly 3 times as long to go through there as it did in California. California was all about those deli-counter number tags. They assigned you a letter and a number and when you were called, they took care of all your stuff at once. In New Jersey, they are ALL about the assembly line approach. First the reception area. Then the document checkers. Then the counter, the waiting room, the counter again. And if you're really lucky, that's when you get to leave. If you came to the DMV for more than one thing, you need to start over again.

If the lines were short, it wouldn't be an issue. But due to budget cuts and the miserable economy, my county (which contains Newark) halved the number of DMVs from 4 to 2. Additionally, one of the remaining DMVs only does licenses, not registrations or inspections. Which means, 800k people are attempting to use this one DMV per year. Tell me that's not an infrastructure problem of the highest magnitude.

Something Fishy's Goin' On

When I first contemplated moving back to New Jersey, I forgot to account for a few things I had acquired since I had moved out to CA. Most notably, my fish, Leonard Nimoy, and what seemed to be about 40 tons of paper.


I'm not the kind of person to go buying pets and then abandoning them. the purchase of an animal is a special contract that says you're taking responsibility for their life and welfare. Even if it is something as mundane as a blue Betta.

Figuring out a way to transport my fish was a bit of a conundrum. There was no way he was going to fit into those little shampoo bottles with their narrow necks. No, what I needed were spice jars. I was sure I'd seen jars large enough to hold Leonard, but small enough to get through airport security. More importantly, I remembered where I had seen them: the Ace Hardware store in El Ceritto had sold me several spice jars for my spice collection while I was in housing for work. I desperately hoped they were 3 oz. or less. Sure enough, the label on the shelf said they were 3 ounces, even though the plastic didn't claim it anywhere.

I made sure that when I packed for the flight, I included the Ace Hardware bag and the receipt which claimed I had purchased three 3oz. plastic bottles. Exactly what I was carrying. It ended up not mattering. Security didn't ask.

Leonard Nimoy and I did raise quite a few eyebrows at the Oakland Security Screening, though. And I'm guessing that at 6am (or any time, for that matter), they probably don't see many people taking their fish on the flight with them. Dogs maybe; cats potentially; fish? most likely not. And a few of the security screeners got a good laugh seeing how freaked out I was when they joked with me that they had run him through the x-ray machine. I just about lost it!

For all the pain and obnoxiousness they put you through when you're rushing to make your flight, at least the screeners still have a little bit of a sense of humor.

The Final Straw

Oh, for pete's sakes!

My coworkers and I might just be the only people who can say "we hate our job, and our job hates us."

Clap On, Clap Off. Clap On Clap Off!

Repetition makes long strips easier. Luckily, while I am an office drone, repetition is ALL I do.



This is seriously my day. Call the TIME phone line 4 times a day, Sign a piece of paper 4 times a day. All for the sake of making sure we're actually IN the Building. AT work. Not necessarily DOING work but at least they know we're there.

Additionally, they've incorporated a new game into our day: Musical Rooms. In which all 28 of us manage to settle into a room that seats 20 and only has enough outlets and ethernet ports for 20 computers, and then someone tells us that we've been moved to another room on an entirely different floor which is also insufficient to seat us all. So we all hustle as quick as we can to the other room, fighting tooth and nail to get a spot where we can A) sit and B) plug in a computer. Rinse, repeat. They had us switch rooms THREE times.

I'm a Survivor

True Story:


You have to wonder about a company that seriously considers asking its workforce who they would eat first in the case of desertion. You have to wonder about it even more when this company considers this question to be part of "team-building". Personally, I'm not too thrilled that 140 of my coworkers now know that in case of a dire emergency, I would eat coworker Keith. This doesn't make them trust me more, and knowing who they would eat doesn't make me like THEM any better.

Where back at headquarters, so I'm back on a M-F schedule and working 8:30-5. I'm still working on adjusting my schedule.

This comic clearly depicts 4 of my coworkers. I don't think the women will be too unhappy with their portrayal. I think they're sorta cute, and they always are impeccably dressed. The managers however??? My dad thinks I drew one of them kinda girly. Ah well. There's only so much that facial hair can do. You all know that drawing males is not my strong suit. Plus, their clothes are always so boring.

I'm home for the holidays! Hurray!

Upside-Down World

The thing about working in hospitals, is that you're constantly being exposed to all sorts of nasty things. MRSA, Meningitis, TB, not to mention just about every cold and flu making the yearly rounds. So I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised last April, when I first started working in the hospitals and found myself getting ridiculously sick on a weekly basis.

Things have stabilized since, and for the most part, I'm fairly healthy. I take precautions when working (like washing my hands frequently, not touching patients or really ANYTHING, and keeping away from rooms with warning signs on them). But even the most careful person can't avoid a cold when every one of her coworkers has managed to catch it.

And that's where I find myself today; Sore throat, dry cough, woozy, droopy, blah, and feeling like I'm under 66 feet of water (that's two whole atmospheres of pressure!). I'm not imagining my coworkers are hagfish or hairbrushes yet, but I feel the time is close at hand.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

It's official. Today, the people in my position in Northern California are all becoming hourly employees, and therefore, legally "exempt". And all the joys that go with that.



There are a lot of whispers about what this all means for us. Let me enumerate:

Pros
1) Paid commute time! (we were already getting paid for mileage)
2) Shift differential! (not so great for the night shift, which is only apparently getting about 30 cents more per hour than the evening shift)
3) Extra pay for working on national holidays!
4) No more responding to Payroll emails!

Cons
1) Only 30 minute lunches (No more going out for lunch).
2) No combining breaks.
3) We must clock in and out. We've got only 3 phones in our command center and there's as many as 30 of us on duty at a time.
4) No more leaving early if there's nothing to do.
5) No more taking lunches together and the first lunch of evening shift must be taken at 4:20pm.
6) All time worked and commuting time must be signed off by at least 3 people.
7) PTO requests (even PTO that's already been okayed) has to be submitted through a faxed form to several parties who all have to agree it's alright for you to go missing for a day or two.

Seems to me, there's a lot more down than up, but then, I'm a pessimist. On the other hand, it's looking like I'll be getting paid a good bit more, based just on commuting times. Of course, just 12 days from today, we go back to Emeryville, and we don't get paid commuting time OR mileage. Lest you think my company actually LIKES hemorrhaging money.

Bending the Rules

Now that we've been at this hospital for over 3 weeks, there is REALLY nothing to do there. I mean, it's ridiculously slow. Naturally, being an intelligent individual, I am endlessly searching for something to keep me occupied. Unfortunately, nothing is allowed by our "managers". damn. Now we're at a really really small hospital in Manteca. There are more of us than there are nurses! So we get thrown off the floor because we're crowding them.

Twist of irony: I drew this at work two weeks ago, and I am posting this update from work now. MUAHAHAHAH! I'm subverting the system!